Friday, July 18, 2008

In your High School science classes you may have learnt Hooke’s law....What your High School science teacher probably didn’t tell you is that when Robert Hooke discovered his law in 1676, he published it as an anagram, “ceiiinossssttuv”, which he revealed two years later as the Latin “ut tensio, sic vis”, meaning “as the extension, so the force”. This ensured that if someone else made the same discovery, Hooke could reveal the anagram and claim priority, thus buying time in which he alone could build upon the discovery....

Imagine modern biology if the human genome had been announced as an anagram....

Part I: Toward a more open scientific culture...

Many online tools...[expand the range of scientific knowledge that can be shared with the world], and some have had a major impact on how scientists work. Two successful examples are the physics preprint arXiv...and GenBank....

There is a second and more radical way of thinking about how the internet can change science, and that is through a change to the process and scale of creative collaboration itself, a change enabled by social software such as wikis, online forums, and their descendants....

The problem all these sites [collecting comments on scientific papers] have is that while thoughtful commentary on scientific papers is certainly useful for other scientists, there are few incentives for people to write such comments....The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark....Some people find this contrast curious or amusing; I believe it signifies something seriously amiss with science, something we need to understand and change....

These failures of science online are all examples where scientists show a surprising reluctance to share knowledge that could be useful to others. This is ironic, for the value of cultural openness was understood centuries ago by many of the founders of modern science; indeed, the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th century media. The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media....

We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything - data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else - the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good....

Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others may build upon and extend the work of individual scientists in ways they themselves would never have conceived....

Let me describe two strategies that have been successful in the past, and that offer a template for future success.

The first is a top-down strategy that has been successfully used by the open access (OA) movement. The goal of the OA movement is to make scientific research freely available online to everyone in the world. It’s an inspiring goal, and the OA movement has achieved some amazing successes. Perhaps most notably, in April 2008 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that every paper written with the support of their grants must eventually be made open access. The NIH is the world’s largest grant agency; this decision is the scientific equivalent of successfully storming the Bastille.

The second strategy is bottom-up. It is for the people building the new online tools to also develop and boldly evangelize ways of measuring the contributions made with the tools....

Part II: Collaboration Markets: building a collective working memory for science...

In economics, it’s been understood for hundreds of years that wealth is created when we lower barriers to trade, provided there is a trust infrastructure of laws and enforcement to prevent cheating and ensure trade is uncoerced. The basic idea...goes back to David Ricardo in 1817....

Although Ricardo’s work was in economics, his analysis works equally well for trade in ideas....Unfortunately, science currently lacks the trust infrastructure and incentives necessary for such free, unrestricted trade of questions and ideas.

An ideal collaboration market will enable just such an exchange of questions and ideas. It will bake in metrics of contribution so participants can demonstrate the impact their work is having. Contributions will be archived, timestamped, and signed, so it’s clear who said what, and when. Combined with high quality filtering and search tools, the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage. This will change science.

Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/18/2008 10:59:00 AM.

The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.